Giant Sets

During every compound exercise, there is a group of muscle synergists, that work together to overcome and go through the heavy workload.

When a given muscle group is being trained, the synergists too, are being worked on and get exhausted.

Naturally, when you start training those muscle groups, they can not contract so intensively, due to the fact they have been exhausted beforehand and are not completely fresh.

Additionally, when you execute a given exercise under a certain angle, you target some muscle sectors and fibers of the activated musculature, more than others. It is also well known that the intense workout, under a certain angle, for the given muscle group, limits the capabilities for the next exercise, even though the angle for it might be completely different.

Considering this, we can conclude that through our usual workout, we cannot complete every exercise with maximum, optimal intensity.

It even goes deeper- The more intense the first exercise is, the less power and energy we have for the exercises that will follow up, until the end of the workout. As an end result, the muscle sectors, worked on with the last exercises in our training session, will receive the least amount of hypertrophy stimulus, due to the lower intensity.

These issues of the usual workout, can be easily solved by the methods of triple and giant sets.

Giant sets include 4 to 6 consecutively completed exercises for the same muscle group, done in a block with bigger or smaller rests in between the exercises.

The main idea chased here, using this specialized method, is the idea of equal tension for all the sectors of a given muscle group. In reality, giant sets are a type of circuit workout, as in the circuits (the giant set), we train the same muscle group, using different exercises.

Even though all of the sectors of the trained muscle group are progressively more and more exhausted, with each and every giant set, the workload upon them is comparatively equal. Therefore, the recovery and growth stimulus is pretty much equivalent.

Examples

Chest

Incline barbell bench press

Flat dumbbell bench press

Pec deck

Cross overs

Flat dumbbell flys

Back

Deadlifts

Seal rows

Cable rows

Lat pulldowns

Shrugs

Shoulders

Front dumbbell raises

Lateral dumbbell raises

Rear deltoid dumbbell flys

Behind the neck barbell shoulder press

Quadriceps

Leg extensions

Leg press

Hack squats

Front squats

Lunges

Summary

These two methods are correlated to the principle of progressive overload, especially when it comes to achieving higher density of the workload. When the task is shaping the musculature, and giving it more separation and detail, it’s hard to find a tool that’s more effective than the methods based on the quality principle.

The benefits of the triple and giant sets that we talked about above, are the complete opposite of the intense methods used in the off season, when the goal is saturated hypertrophy.

As a conclusion we can say that this way, these principles give our body a De-adapting effect, which boosts the potential capabilities of the organism for the next training cycles.